Hackers reportedly plan to fight back against Internet censorship by putting their own communications satellites into orbit and developing a grid of ground stations to track and communicate with them.

The news comes as the tech world is up in arms about proposed legislation that many feel would threaten online freedom.

According to BBC News, the satellite plan was recently outlined at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin. It's being called the "Hackerspace Global Grid."

If you don't like the idea of hackers being able to communicate better, hacker activist Nick Farr said knowledge is the only motive of the project, which also includes the development of new electronics that can survive in space, and launch vehicles that can get them there.

Farr and his cohorts are working on the project along with Constellation, a German aerospace research initiative that involves interlinked student projects.

You might think it would be hard for just anybody to put a satellite into space, but hobbyists and amateurs have been able in recent years to use balloons to get them up there. However, without the deep pockets of national agencies or large companies they have a hard time tracking the devices.

To better locate their satellites, the German hacker group came up with the idea of a sort of reverse GPS that uses a distributed network of low-cost ground stations that can be bought or built by individuals.

Supposedly, these stations would be able to pinpoint satellites at any given time while improving the transmission of data from the satellites to Earth.

The plan isn't without limitations.

For one thing, low orbit satellites don't stay in a single place. And any country could go to the trouble of disabling them. At the same time, outer space isn’t actually governed by the countries over which it floats.

As PC World's Tony Bradley put it, the bill is a combination of an overzealous drive to fight Internet piracy, with elected representatives who don't know the difference between DNS, IM, and MP3. In short, SOPA is a "draconian legislation that far exceeds its intended scope, and threatens the Constitutional rights of law abiding citizens," he wrote.

And apparently those who typically don't follow the law -- hackers -- think there's something they can do about it.

IDG News Service - Every enterprise software vendor will tell you how hot and in-demand their products are, but the notion rings fairly true with respect to BI (business intelligence) and advanced analytics. The products just kept selling throughout the global recession, as companies looked to gain insights into their business and subsequently, more efficiency as well as new ideas.

Toss in this year's rise of the "Big Data" buzz-phrase to near-ubiquitous status, and it seems like 2012 could be the biggest year yet for the analytics market. Here's a look at what some experts, as well as a reading of the tea leaves, suggest will be the hottest topics in analytics next year.

Big Data is not going away

Big Data seems to be the new SOA (service oriented architecture) as industry terms go, with seemingly every other vendor product pitch attempting to hitch a ride. All are professing to help with the same problem: getting something useful out of ever-larger mountains of information, not only from transactional business applications but unstructured data from social networking sites, sensors and other sources.

MORE ON 2012: Gartner: The top 10 strategic technology trends for 2012

The Hadoop open-source programming framework is closely associated with the Big Data movement. The market can expect that Hadoop-based data warehousing appliances "will become the hottest new platforms in the coming year," said Forrester Research analyst James Kobielus. Also look for more companies to roll out Hadoop-related consulting services, modeling tools and other products.

In-memory processing will be the belle of the ball

SAP has spent the past 18 months touting the virtues of its HANA in-memory database, which it says can dramatically speed up data exploration and analysis, since it puts information to be processed in RAM instead of reading it off traditional disks.

While Oracle CEO Larry Ellison once pooh-poohed SAP's plans, his company has since announced the Exalytics in-memory machine, a new member of its family of specialized hardware-software appliances.

Smaller companies such as Qlikview and Tableau, both of which use in-memory technology for their BI and visualization tools, should also boost their profile next year. Some could also be acquisition targets for larger vendors looking to ride the in-memory wave.

But "enterprise-friendly" features such as support for third-party ETL (extract, transform and load) tools will be key to their growth, Curt Monash of Monash Research added.

Will analytics-as-a-service take off?

Next year could bring out "a great many vendors" offering large-scale analytics as an on-demand cloud service, and there's a market for it, Kobielus said. "Petascale analytics is not necessarily something a lot of companies want to bring in-house.

But Monash isn't so sure. "Remote computing BI that focuses on hardware cost sharing is problematic," he said. "Moving data in and out of the cluster is a big part of the overall cost, at least if you plan to process it only occasionally once it gets there. I haven't seen a plan yet that gets around that point."

HP can finally be a big player in analytics -- if it's careful

With its Neoview platform, Hewlett-Packard wanted to stand alongside the likes of Teradata as a top player in data warehousing. But that effort never gained much traction despite HP's efforts. But with this year's acquisition of analytic data warehouse vendor Vertica under its belt, the only thing HP has to do to be relevant in that market is "avoid stupidity," Monash said.

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"I don't think trying to force Vertica beyond its natural growth, the way EMC is with Greenplum, is necessarily a good idea," he added. "Natural growth in Vertica's case is plenty fast anyway. Obviously, making good Vertica hardware would be nice. But being hardware-independent is crucial to Vertica, not least because of cloud deployment, an option many buyers want to at least have in their hip pockets."

Mobile BI will gain momentum

The software industry's move to support mobile devices won't leave analytics behind, especially with the extra space for slicing-and-dicing data provided by the larger screens on tablets like the iPad. Mobile BI in fact will go mainstream next year, Forrester Research analyst Boris Evelson said in a recent blog post. "One needs to make decisions when and where they need to be made. Not 'when I get back to the office,' which may be too late."

BI and analytics start showing up everywhere

"Pervasive" analytics capabilities are a crucial aspect of Oracle's next-generation Fusion Applications. Instead of logging into a separate BI platform, or getting canned reports created by IT sent to them, users are presented with analytics within the context and workflows of the various Fusion apps. Other ERP (enterprise resource planning) vendors may start mimicking Oracle's approach if the concept is a hit with customers.

We’ve all had bosses do things we didn’t like, appreciate, or respect. And every manager has done things they later regret. The business world is, by necessity, one of real-time decisions and judgment calls that sometimes turn out to be bad choices, in retrospect. After all, nobody’s perfect. We all make mistakes. And that’s a good thing, since that’s are how we learn lessons, including how to do our jobs better. That goes for every employee, manager, executive, business owner, CEO, everyone. But sometimes a mistake can become a slippery slope. An exception can all-too-easily become the rule. Simply put, there are lines that managers should not cross, behavior they should not exhibit, and not to be overly dramatic, pathways that lead more or less to the dark side. In 10 Things Great Managers Do, I went back in time to the best characteristics of the best CEOs I’ve worked for and with over the past 30 years. I decided to do the same thing here for the simple reason that I learned as much from the negative experiences as I did from the positive ones. Keep in mind, this isn’t meant to be a whine-fest to get employees riled up and pissed off at their bosses. Think of it instead as a standard that employees and managers alike can agree upon and, perhaps, a wakeup call for those who need one. 10 Things Managers Should Never Do

1. Order people around like dictators. Contrary to popular belief, managers are not dictators. Every manager has at least one boss. Even CEOs serve the board directors and shareholders. Any manager who thinks he can order people around or abuse his authority because he’s the boss is a terrible leader. Employees are not soldiers or children. You can tell them what their job is and even fire them, if you want, but if you order them around, the good ones will up and quit, as they should.
2. Forget about customers. It never ceases to amaze me how many managers forget that organizations and companies exist for just one reason - to win, maintain, and support customers. Business is about business, and when you make it about you - your issues, your fears, your empire, your thin skin, whatever - you cease to be an effective manager.
3. Behave like arrogant jerks that are better than others. Just to be clear, I’m not saying managers or bosses can’t be jerks. A lot of people are jerks, including plenty of employees, and almost everybody’s a jerk under certain circumstances. I’m specifically talking about the arrogant “I’m better than the little people” thing. It makes you look like a little brat and completely neuters your authority and credibility.
4. Let their egos write checks that reality can’t cash.Oftentimes, leaders attain their position because they believe they’re special - a fascinating misconception that’s nevertheless often self-fulfilling. The problem with that is the slippery slope of drinking your own Kool Aid. Either you grow up or, sooner or later, things end up unraveling. I’ve seen it time and again and it isn’t pretty.
5. Publicly eviscerate employees. Of all the things I’ve experienced over the decades, this is not only the most dehumanizing but also the most demoralizing to employees. I had a couple of CEOs that practiced this on a regular basis and both were universally despised, as a result. Moreover, both self-destructed in the end.
6. Wall off their feelings. This may sound touchy feely, but it’s far from it. Researchers are fond of classifying executives and leaders as psychopathic, but the mechanism by which that happens is compartmentalizing of emotions. If you’ve ever wondered how people who seem to lack any semblance of humor or humility can behave the way they do, the answer is, if you’re not connected to your emotions, you’re far less human.
7. Surround themselves with bureaucrats, BSers, and yes-men. When you encourage the status quo and discourage dissent, you doom the organization to stagnation and eventual decline.
8. Threaten. Threats don’t work. They’re just as likely to motivate the opposite behavior of what you’re trying to achieve. They diminish your authority and make you appear weak and small. You should communicate what you want and why, then act on the results. That works. Threats don’t. And for God’s sake, never threaten an employee with his job or a vendor with your business. That’s just out of control.
9. Act out like little children. Everyone goes through the same stages of human development on the road to adulthood and maturity. Unfortunately, some of us get stuck in one stage or another, stunting our growth and rendering us dysfunctional. We look just like ordinary adults, but we actually behave a lot more like children, acting out, throwing tantrums, and generally making life miserable for everyone around us.
10. Break the law. America is a nation of laws and, civil or criminal, they’re black and white for a reason. For some reason, executives will sometimes risk everything - power, wealth, careers, families, everything - for motives most of us will never understand. We’re talking accounting, securities, bank, wire, and mail fraud; insider trading; bribery; obstruction of justice; conspiracy; discrimination; harassment; it’s a long, long list.

iCloud stores your music, photos, documents, and more and wirelessly pushes them to all your devices. Automatic, effortless, and seamless — it just works.

Comes with every new Apple device.

Every new iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch comes with iOS 5. And every new Mac comes with OS X Lion. Which means the new Apple devices you purchase are all ready for iCloud, right out of the box.

Simple to use. Simple to set up.

iCloud is easy to use, and setting it up is no exception. It takes only a few steps before all your important stuff is up to date on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, and PC. Your content. On all your devices. iCloud is so much more than a hard drive in the sky. It makes it quick and effortless to access just about everything on the devices you use every day. iCloud automatically and securely stores your content so it's always available to your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, or PC. It gives you access to your music, apps, latest photos, and more from whichever device you happen to be using. And it keeps your email, contacts, and calendars up to date across all your devices. No syncing required. No management required. In fact, no anything required. iCloud does it all for you.

Free gets you a lot.

When you sign up for iCloud, you automatically get 5GB of free storage. And that’s plenty of room, because of the way iCloud stores your content. Your purchased music, apps, books, and TV shows, as well as your Photo Stream, don’t count against your free storage. Since your mail, documents, Camera Roll, account information, settings, and other app data don’t use as much space, you’ll find that 5GB goes a long way. And if you need more storage, you can easily purchase astorage upgrade right from your device. http://movies.apple.com/media/us/icloud/2011/tours/apple-icloud-feature_video-us-20111004_r848-9cie.mov?width=848&height=480